Gerald R. Cragg, The Church and the Age of Reason, 1648–1789 (1960, reprinted 1985), provides a concise overview of the subject; a comprehensive treatment is offered in E. Préclin and E. Jarry, Les Luttes politiques et doctrinales aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, 2 vol. (1955–56). Specific significant topics in church history are surveyed in A.G. Dickens, The Counter Reformation (1968, reissued 1979); Jean Delumeau, Catholicism Between Luther and Voltaire: A New View of the Counter-Reformation (1977, originally published in French, 1971); Émile G. Léonard, A History of Protestantism: The Reformation (1965; originally published in French, 1961); Robert O. Crummey, The Old Believers & the World of Antichrist: The Vyg Community & the Russian State, 1694–1855 (1970); Jean Orcibal, Louis XIV et les Protestants: la cabale des accommodeurs de religion, la caisse des conversions, la révocation de l’Édit de Nantes (1951); Mack Holt, The French Wars of Religion (1993); Barbara Diefendorf, Beneath the Cross: Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth-Century Paris (1991); James Brodrick, The Progress of the Jesuits, 1556–79 (1947, reprinted 1986); Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition (1965, reissued 1976); Henry Kamen, Philip of Spain (1997); and John McManners, French Ecclesiastical Society Under the Ancien Régime: A Study of Angers in the Eighteenth Century (1960).
Political questions are discussed in Theodore K. Rabb, The Struggle for Stability in Early Modern Europe (1975); J.H. Shennan, The Origins of the Modern European State, 1450–1725 (1974); and A.R. Myers, Parliaments and Estates in Europe to 1789 (1975). Ragnhild Hatton (ed.), Louis XIV and Absolutism (1976), is a collection of articles, mostly translated from French. William F. Church, Richelieu and Reason of State (1973), is another study of absolutism. Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vol. (1978), is a political history. Trevor Aston (ed.), Crisis in Europe, 1560–1660 (1965, reissued 1975); Geoffrey Parker and Lesley M. Smith (eds.), The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century (1978); Perez Zagorin, Rebels and Rulers, 1500–1660, 2 vol. (1982); and Roland Mousnier, Peasant Uprisings in Seventeenth-Century France, Russia, and China (1971; originally published in French, 1967), are studies of resistance and revolts.
Diplomacy tends to be subsumed into general histories. Albert Sorel, Europe and the French Revolution: The Political Traditions of the Old Régime (1969; originally published in French, 1885); Jill Lisk, The Struggle for Supremacy in the Baltic, 1600–1725 (1967); Derek McKay and H.M. Scott, The Rise of the Great Powers, 1648–1815 (1983); Ragnhild Hatton (ed.), Louis XIV and Europe (1976); J.S. Bromley and E.H. Kossmann (eds.), Britain and the Netherlands in Europe and Asia (1968); and Mark A. Thomson et al., William III and Louis XIV: Essays 1680–1720 (1968), examine the main outlines of early modern diplomacy. A starting point for the study of war is Michael Roberts, The Military Revolution, 1560–1660 (1956). A later contribution to the ensuing debate is Geoffrey Parker, Spain and the Netherlands, 1559–1659, rev. ed. (1990). The effects of war are treated in G.N. Clark, War and Society in the Seventeenth Century (1958, reprinted 1985); André Corvisier, Armies and Societies in Europe, 1494–1789 (1979; originally published in French, 1976); H.W. Koch, The Rise of Modern Warfare, 1618–1815 (1981); John Childs, Armies and Warfare in Europe, 1648–1789 (1982); Christopher Duffy, The Army of Frederick the Great (1974); and Jeremy Black, European Warfare, 1660–1815 (1994), and A Military Revolution? Military Change and European Society, 1550–1800 (1991). The Enlightenment
The vast literature on the Enlightenment encompasses a variety of historiographical approaches. Peter Gay, The Enlightenment, an Interpretation, 2 vol. (1966–69, reprinted 1996), is a magisterial work that has long served as one of the pillars of the study of the subject. Among the most-rewarding considerations of the Enlightenment that are grounded in social history is J.G.A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, 6 vol. (1999–2015), a multivolume study of historian Edward Gibbon, whom Pocock uses as a foundation upon which to construct wider discussions of the nature of the Enlightenment that are contextualized in a careful characterization of the law, religion, and society of the period. Franco Venturi, The End of the Old Regime in Europe, 1768–1776: The First Crisis, trans. from Italian by R. Burr Litchfield (1989), and Italy and the Enlightenment: Studies in a Cosmopolitan Century, trans. from Italian by Susan Corsi (1972), take a similar social historical approach.
A number of historians have argued that, rather than a single Enlightenment, there were many separate national enlightenments, including John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples, 1680–1760 (2005), which focuses on the development of the discipline of political economy in Scotland and southern Italy. Surveying popular discourse ranging from journalism to rumour mongering, Robert Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775–1800 (1979), The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (1982), and George Washington’s False Teeth: An Unconventional Guide to the Eighteenth Century (2003), investigate the “low” Enlightenment, partly shaped by ideas that filtered down from the philosophes. James Van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (2001), also studies Enlightenment manifestations in the broader society.
Returning to a focus on intellectual history, Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (2001), Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity. and the Emancipation of Man (2006), and A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy (2010), differentiate between “Counter-Enlightenment,” the “moderate mainstream” Enlightenment of Locke, Hobbes, Descartes, and Voltaire—which was willing to compromise with the church and the monarchial power structure—and the atheist, democratic, “radical” Enlightenment of Benedict de Spinoza and his intellectual disciples. Likewise, Anthony Pagden, The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters (2013), concentrates on high intellectual history as it finds cosmopolitanism to be the defining contribution of the Enlightenment
Other useful works include Edward Andrew, Patrons of Enlightenment (2006); Liana Vardi, The Physiocrats and the World of the Enlightenment (2012); A. Rupert Hall, From Galileo to Newton, 1630–1720 (1963, reprinted 1981); Anthony Kenny, Descartes: A Study of His Philosophy (1968, reprinted 2009), Maurice Cranston, John Locke: A Biography (1957, reissued 1985); Frank E. Manuel, A Portrait of Isaac Newton (1968, reprinted 1990); Paul Hazard, The European Mind: The Critical Years, 1680–1715 (1953, reissued 2013; originally published in French, 1935); Alan Charles Kors and Paul J. Korshin (eds.), Anticipations of the Enlightenment in England, France, and Germany (1987); and Ira O. Wade, The Intellectual Origins of the French Enlightenment (1971, reissued 2015).